Máster en Democracia y Gobierno
2011
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2012 CP Departamento de Ciencia Política y Relaciones Internacionales Seminario de X Investigación Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
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Working Papers Online Series
www.uam.es/wpcpolitica
Estudio/Working Paper 143/2012
Language Policies and Language Ideologies in Contemporary
Catalonia
Dr. Roberto Garvía
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Dr. Thomas Jeffrey Miley
University of Cambridge
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Part One: The normative and legitimizing discourse of Catalan nationalism
Uneven Development, Xenophobic Fears, and Romantic Nationalism
The nationalist movement in Catalonia emerged in the nineteenth century, a product of dynamics associated with uneven capitalist development. While Catalonia witnessed the radical social transformation of industrialization, the rest of Spain did not (with the notable exception of the Basque
Country). This led to conflicts of interest over economic policy and to an increasing disenchantment among Catalan industrialists with the Spanish state, which came to be perceived as effectively captured by large land-owning interests and either unwilling or otherwise unable to protect domestic and imperial textile markets from the scourge of international competition. Canonical historical accounts have stressed the causal link between these economic conflicts over protectionism and the percolation of regionalist consciousness (Viçens Vives). From the start, such consciousness was impregnated with a sense of cultural superiority, as reflected in a set of stereotypes about industriousness versus laziness not uncommon in comparatively over-developed regions of poor countries (Hirschman, Linz).
This sense of cultural superiority was combined with a sense of demographic insecurity. Xenophobic fears became latently diffused throughout the region’s middle strata in reaction to the onset of internal migration, as successive waves of migrant peasants from poorer regions flocked to the factories and began to proliferate among the ranks of the emergent industrial proletariat. Images of godless, anarchist, African-blooded, illiterate. Castilian-speaking working class hordes were correspondingly constructed and construed as an existential menace threatening to tear asunder the Catalan social fabric (Marfany).
Even so, the region’s emergent nationalist movement did not merely reflect and spread crass notions of cultural superiority and xenophobic fears of the proletariat and of proletarianization. Instead, its rhetorical idiom was infused with a heavy dose of romanticism as well, an ideological current which had been imported and adapted from elsewhere in Europe – most notably, Belgium, Germany,
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Hungary, Italy, and Poland. The spokesmen of European romanticism were poets and novelists, who typically “introduced a cult of the mediaeval or pre-modern past,” and who valorized vernaculars for allegedly embodying “the accumulated transcript of the experience of past generations” (Anderson).
The Catalan variant of this romantic current would congeal in the Renaixença, an intellectual movement which pursued the “rebirth” or “reawakening” of the Catalan culture. As it would elsewhere, romantic agitation in favor of the local culture soon gave way to political expression, with the establishment of the Centre Catalá in 1886. By the end of the century, a full-fledged nationalist political movement in the region had been born, one that would stress the importance of the Catalan language as the “ànima del poble” (or “spirit of the Catalan people”).
The romantic influence on the first generation of “Catalanist” political discourse is more than evident in one of the movement’s foundational texts, Enric Prat de la Riba’s La nacionalit catalana (1906).
Prat de la Riba singled out language as the most important characteristic that defined the Catalan nation vis-à-vis other nations. For Prat de la Riba, nation and language were co-terminus, part and parcel of a unique Catalan Volkgeist, up to the point where “one’s own language is the most powerful instrument of nationalization and therefore for the maintenance of the life of a nationality” (qtd in
Conversi 1990: 54).
The romantic notion that the Catalan language is the most important facet or even essence of a differentiated Catalan identity has remained a dominant current in the intellectual and political history of Catalan nationalism.1 This main current has likewise been consistently complimented with strong undercurrents of beliefs about cultural superiority, as well as projections of xenophobic fears.
1 On the dominant role of language in the early Catalan nationalist movement, see also Paulston 1987, Payne 1971, Mar Molinero 2000 and Bonfiglio 2010: 29-30 3
The Dialectic of “Castilianization” versus “Catalanization”
The extent of ethno-linguistic heterogeneity in Catalonia is a crucial demographic trait that distinguishes the dynamics of micro-nationalist mobilization there from its counterparts in many other advanced capitalist democratic contexts, such as Quebec, Scotland, or Flanders.
Such internal ethno-linguistic diversity is itself frequently invoked as a justification for the urgency of measures to promote and protect the local language.2
The valorization, “normalization,” protection and promotion of the Catalan language advocated by the nationalist movement has invariantly been expressed as a form of resistance to the process of
“Castilianization.” Catalonia is of course the home of the Catalan language, a language with a long and rich literary tradition, whose cultural revival during the latter half of the nineteenth century immediately preceded and fueled the birth of the nationalist movement in the region. But another language is spoken there as well – namely, Castilian, also known as Spanish, one of the world’s dominant languages.
Precisely because the Catalan language finds itself in competition and conflict on its very home terrain against Castilian, a much more powerful, indeed dominant world language, Defenders of
Catalan language policies have frequently argued that proactive state measures of protection are required to structure the incentives of participants in the Catalan “public sphere” and in Catalan “civil society” to employ the local tongue. Without proactive measures, “language protectionists” insist, the
Castilian-language monopoly of these spheres, itself in no small part an ill-begotten fruit of Franquist cultural discrimination, would have stood little chance of being effectively rolled back.
There has been some debate among historians about both the extent and the cause of the presence of
Castilian in Catalonia as far back as the Old Regime. The debate centers on: (1) how far the gradual process of “Castilianization” in some spheres of activity had already advanced before the triumph of
2 The field of Catalan socio-linguistics is rife with such forms of justification. For two fine overviews of the field, see Boix and Vila 1998, Vallverdú 1998. . 4 the liberal revolution of the late 1830’s; and (2) whether this process was a product of external imposition alone, or alternatively, whether it was a response to internal demand as well.3 But regardless of when and how the Castilian language was initially introduced, it is clear that by the middle of the nineteenth century its use had become relatively widespread. Indeed, according to Joan
Lluís Marfany, after the liberal revolution, the presence of Castilian would no longer merely be the product of a slow and gradual social process; instead, it came to be deliberately (though ineffectively) pursued by the Spanish authorities, out of an ideological commitment to building a Spanish nation and thus to ensuring that all citizens could speak the Castilian language (2001, p. 413).
The new form of linguistic consciousness embodied in the Renaixença caused certain segments of
Catalan society to begin actively resisting this process of “Castilianization.”4
From the start, the Catalan nationalists were linguistic militants. They agitated for “linguistic normalization,” which for them implied: (1) the re-imposition of the language in those spaces from which it had been excluded, such as in the administration of justice, the educational system, and the bureaucracy; (2) the codification of the language; and (3) the cleansing of it from “impurities” and instances of linguistic interference (Marfany 2001, p. 16).
In 1914, after over a decade of ruling at the level of the Diputació de Barcelona, the nationalists, under the leadership of Enric Prat de la Riba and Francesc Cambó and organized in the Lliga
Regionalista, were able to get the Spanish government of the Restoration monarchy to grant Catalonia a limited degree of autonomy, with the creation of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya. Under its auspices, the Lliga would promote several measures of “linguistic normalization,” intended to re- introduce the Catalan language into public life (Carr 1996, pp. 549-555).5
3 For three opposed positions in this debate, see Ferrer 1985, Anguera 1997, and Marfany 2001. 4 For summary overviews of this long and complicated process of “linguistic awakening,” see Vicens Vives (1986: 165-180), Fontana (1998: 409-448); and Termes (1987: 130-137). Also of much interest is the more recent historiographical debate between Pere Anguera and Joan-Lluís Marfany, sparked initially by Anguera’s critique (1997) of the ubiquity of anachronism in works such as Ferrer (1985). In turn, Joan-Lluís Marfany (2001) has critiqued Anguera for relying on anachronisms of his own. 5 For the classic treatment of the Lliga, see Molas (1972). For a brief sketch of some of the cultural policies promoted by the Mancomunitat, see Voltas (1996: 55). 5
But in 1925, Primo de Rivera would disband the Mancomunitat; and during his dictatorship, all of the linguistic and cultural measures that the Lliga had promoted would be rolled back. Primo proved to be an ardent enemy of the Catalan language. He declared Castilian to be the only legitimate language for use in official acts, in public registers, and in the schools. His position was that:
“Catalan, just like Basque, Valencian and Galician, are vernacular languages and literary idioms.
Their first space is that of the home; and they also have a philological and an etymological value . . .
But above them, Castilian . . . must be the obligatory basis for the spiritual formation of the Spanish citizenry, [and the formation] of all positive relations between Spaniards.”(Quoted in Termes 1987:
313).
However, the repression of the Primo era only served to galvanize Catalan public opinion in defense of the local language and culture. So much so that by April of 1931, when the Second Republic was declared, the Primo-era repression had contributed to the conversion of virtually the entire spectrum of parties with parliamentary representatives in Catalonia to some form of “Catalanism” (though notably no such conversion took place among the anarchists, who were hegemonic among the organized working class and remained for the most part committed to a militant brand of
“internationalism”) (Termes 1987: 314).6 With the consecration of the Second Republic, Catalonia was promised a significant degree of autonomy; and during both the debate over the republican constitution and the subsequent debate over Catalonia’s Statute of Autonomy, the issue of the use of the Catalan language in the educational system would be fiercely contested (Termes 1987: 342-343;
Ucelay da Cal 1982: 136).7 In the end, it would be decided that all children had a right to receive primary schooling in their “mother tongue,” but that at the same time they all had to learn both
Castilian and Catalan (Voltas 1996: 55). In addition, the Statute would declare both of these languages to be co-official in Catalonia; and it would grant all citizens the right to choose the
6 Also see Enric Ucelay da Cal, La Catalunya populista: Imatge, cultura i política en l’etapa republicana (1931-1939) (Barcelona: Edicions de la Magrana, 1982), especially pp. 93-120. 7 For an overview of the debates over the Statute of Autonomy, see the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Oct. 1932 and Jan. 1933. 6 language of interaction with public authorities and functionaries, as well as the right to choose the language of composition for all public documents (Termes 1987: 344).
With the defeat of the Republic in the Civil War at the hands of Francisco Franco’s nacionales, all of these measures would be rolled back once again. Franco’s victorious regime would prohibit the use of the Catalan language in all spheres of public life; and it would actively encourage all citizens to
“speak the language of the Empire.”8
The regime’s roll-back of regional autonomy, it prohibitions on the use of the Catalan language in the educational system and public life, and other aspects of its aggressive propagation of a Spanish nation-building project all proved incapable of destroying regional-nationalist consciousness. In fact, to a certain extent these policies of linguistic and cultural repression even ended up backfiring on the
Franco regime. In particular, they served to alienate broad segments of the Catalan middle classes from the regime. More generally, the grievances accumulated during the Franco period eventually helped to galvanize broad support for at least some of the aspirations of the nationalist movement across the spectrum of opposition not only in the region, but throughout the entire country, during the transition to democracy – when the democratic opposition came unanimously to denounce these policies; and the demand for Catalan to be re-included in the educational system in particular and in public life generally would constitute a focal point for mobilizing resistance both by nationalists in the center of the Catalan political spectrum and by socialists and communists on the left (De Riquer 1997:
56).
The Rhetoric of Retribution and the Politics of Memory
Since the return of representative democracy, the policies of linguistic and cultural oppression pursued in the past by the Franco regime have often been mentioned in public debates about current policies of protection and promotion of the Catalan language, pursued by the democratically elected
8 The policies of linguistic and cultural repression of the Franco regime have been well-documented. See, in particular, the work of Josep Benet, especially his classic, Catalunya sota el règim franquista (1978), but also, his more recent and more polemical, L’intent franquista de genocidi cultural contra Catalunya (1995). 7 re-constituted regional authorities. Catalan nationalist activists and sympathizers tend to mention this past oppression as a way of legitimating current policies of “linguistic normalization” and justifying their insistence on control over the educational system more generally, which are framed as redressing the consequences of these historical grievances, and as intended to undo the cultural imperialism of the Franco period by reconstructing the region’s linguistic landscape and resurrecting its national consciousness. The retributive logic at work is clear enough: the extraordinary injustices of the past justify and even require redress and compensation in the present.
Meanwhile, critics on the post-Franquist right have also made mention of these historical grievances, sometimes drawing parallels between what they portray as similar nationalist excesses – albeit of opposing cultural persuasions – across the two periods, as famously captured in a 1992 critical exposé of the region’s language policies in the educational system covered on the front page of the Spanish- conservative Madrid-based daily, ABC, under the sensationalist headline, “Igual que Franco, pero al revés” (“The same as Franco, but in reverse”) (find exact reference).
Catalan nationalist activists and sympathizers have not only introduced a retributive logic into the public debate by providing compensation-based justifications for contemporary language policies; they have also not infrequently exaggerated the extent of linguistic and cultural oppression pursued by the Franco regime, which certainly makes sense as a matter of shrewd political propaganda, especially insofar as support for the contemporary nation-building project inside the region (not to mention toleration for it in the rest of the country) are based at least in part on the movement’s ability to continue to portray itself convincingly as a collective victim.
The appeal to historical grievances and to a gloomy history is of course a rather common discursive strategy among nationalist movements (MacMillan 2009: 81-90, Kamusella 2009). As Renan long ago observed: “Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.” ([1882] 1996: 53). Catalan nationalism is certainly not an exception, and the rhetoric of victimhood has been widely used, and not infrequently abused.
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This tendency to exaggerate the level of victimhood is most evident in references to “cultural genocide,” a concept which has sometimes been stretched to describe the linguistic and cultural grievances accumulated during the Franquist period (Benet; DiGiacomo 1999: 112). It is also evident in numerous pronouncements made by prominent public authorities, such as Jordi Pujol, the President of the Catalan Government between 1980 and 2003. Typical in this regard is a public speech of his form 1995, in which he offered as an “uncontestable” example of the harshness of repression and persecution of the Catalan language the alleged fact “one could be sent to jail for sending a wedding invitation in Catalan.” (Pujol 1996: 183).
Pujol was in this instance, as in so many others, “telling a tall tale” of sorts. There is no question that
Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975) was viciously opposed to all projects and identities inimical to his ultranationalist representation of Spain. Catalan, Basque and Galician nationalists suffered Franco’s repression first-hand, as did socialists, anarchists, liberals, republicans, communists, and, in general, anybody who did not fit with the conservative and homogenizing ambitions of the New State.
However, memory is selective, and while some facts are recollected and appropriately refashioned, others which might challenge the official narrative are simply forgotten or ignored. Even though the
Catalan language was certainly persecuted during Franco’s dictatorship, particularly up to the mid
1950’s, Pujol is nevertheless misleading the audience with this narrative of victimhood. For if it was not even possible to print a wedding invitation, who in the audience would think that the regime would allow Catalan books to be published? It did, though, and rather frequently.9
9 There is no scarcity of data, collected by Ferrán Soldevila in his Què cal saber de Cataluyna, in 1968 in Barcelona, which questions this official victimization narrative of Catalan nationalism. A historian with strong nationalist inkling, who in the years before the Civil War published Història de Catalunya -a scholarly work widely acclaimed in nationalist circles as the ultimate corpus of Catalan history, and which, incidentally, was updated and published in 1962 in Barcelona-, Ferrán Soldevila cannot be accused of Francoist sympathies. In his Què cal saber de Cataluyna, Soldevila introduces some data about the Catalan publishing industry up to the final 1960’s. If in 1944 forty three books in Catalan language obtained publishing permission, in 1968 they were five hundred (Soldevila 1968: 163). Certainly, among those who obtained the seal of approval there were prayer and cooking books, but also original literature in Catalan (e.g.the Obres completes of Jacint Verdaguer, Barcelona: Biblioteca Selecta, 1943), as well as scholarly books and essays on the history, politics, and society of Catalonia written by people directly opposed to Franco’s rule, such as Pierre Vilar (Catalunya dins l’Espaya moderna, Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1964), or Ramon d'Abadal, Jordi Rubió, Ferran Soldevila, Miquel Tarradell, Jaume Vicens i Vives (Moments crucials de la història de Catalunya, Barcelona: Vicens Vives, 1962), to give two examples. But aside from publishing groups such as Edicions 62, set up in that year with the goal of 9
Nor did such publishing activities operate in an institutional vacuum. In 1954, and under the shelter of the Jesuit order, the Académia de la Llengua Catalana was reestablished. Eight years later,
Òmnium Cultural, an organization that aimed at the promotion the Catalan language and culture, was founded. In 1963 Òmnium was closed down and forced to operate in a semi-clandestine way, but in
1967 it was permitted to resume openly its activities. Among these, perhaps the most importantly, was the establishment of a teachers program by which current and future school teachers could obtain a certificate as Catalan teachers, which would later, political conditions permitting, find a job in an envisioned Catalan school system. To run this program, Òmnium counted on the support of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, which had been established in 1907, and which was quite active during the dictatorship thanks to the donations from the Catalan Church and the upper class of Catalan society
(Balcells 2007, Balcells, Izquierdo and Pujol (2007: 15-225). In turn, from 1967 the Provincial
Government of Barcelona (Diputación), part and parcel of the Francoist administrative and political apparatus, was issuing Catalan language teaching certificates, in order to send qualified teachers to the libraries supervised by the Diputación, (Arenas 1998: 15-7). Similarly, in 1965, the University of
Barcelona set up a chair in Catalan Language and Literature, and three years later the Autonomous
University of Barcelona followed suit. But such instances and institutional contexts of official toleration are conveniently forgotten, or at least ignored, in mainstream Catalan nationalist narratives about victimhood.
Very much like a set of Matryoshka dolls, the narrative of victimhood during the Franco regime is nested in a more encompassing narrative that interprets the Civil War in Manichean terms, as a war of
Spain against Catalonia, which resulted in the conquest of the latter by Castilian people and armies.
This broader narrative of the Civil War is, again, plainly misleading. As was the case in many other
European countries which witnessed the collapse of their democratic institutions, the political violence that led to the Spanish Civil War was mainly triggered by the conflict between capital and
promoting Catalan culture, Catalan periodicals with a distinctively Catalan agenda (e.g. Serra d’Or, with became a monthly in 1959) were also legally circulating (Santacana 2008).
10 labor, and not by the conflict between the center and peripheral nationalist movements. Certainly, the latter fueled the political turmoil of the pre-war years, as did also the divide between Catholics and anti-clericals, but these cleavages were far from overlapping, and to interpret the Civil War as the armed conflict between two national projects amounts to a serious distortion. It should suffice to recall the internal confrontation within the Catalan national movement. On the one side, the conservative and Catholic Catalan nationalists opened in 1937 in Paris the Oficina de Prensa
Catalana, issued the periodical Occident, “the most important pro-Francoist journal in Europe”
(Balcells 1997: 31), channeled and transferred resources to Franco’s government, and broadcasted
Francoist propaganda though the waves of Ràdio Veritat; on the other, the left-wing Catalan nationalists were in charge of the autonomous Catalan government, and organized the war effort against conservative and Catholic Catalans and other allies of Franco with the help of an autochthonous working-class movement, internationalist and, correspondingly, inimical when not plainly hostile to all sorts of Catalan nationalist discourse (see e.g. Eduard 1987 and 1990).
It is part and parcel of nationalist movements to sweep aside the complexities of history and to represent the nation, however it is imagined, as a culturally uniform, conflict-free organic entity, constantly threatened by external enemies and striving for its own survival, but the unwavering and critical support for Franco of Catholic and conservative Catalan nationalists, and the prevalence of internationalist over nationalist sentiments among the Catalan working class makes it difficult to reconcile such an idyllic nation-building narrative with reality.
Capitalist Expansion, Demographic Anxieties, and the Imperative of “Integration”
From the mid-fifties up through the general crisis of the 1970s, Catalonia would attract an unprecedentedly large new wave of internal migration. By the end of the period, Castilian-speaking migrants from the rest of Spain had come to constitute the core of the industrial working class, comprising clear majorities in most of the municipalities in the industrial belt surrounding Barcelona, and significant minorities throughout all of Catalonia. The new influx came to work in the region’s booming heavy industries, such as the Spanish car company SEAT. The new proletariat was
11 composed in large part of former landless peasant laborers from the south of the country, who themselves had been victims of brutally repressive social and economic conditions perpetuated and enforced in the regions of their birth by the regime. For this reason, the vast majority of these internal migrant workers arrived on the Catalan scene already alienated from the regime, and therefore often well-disposed towards native middle-class nationalist activists in opposition to the regime, in accordance with the tendency to consider the enemy of one’s enemy to be one’s friend.
The wave of migration to Catalonia was a basic feature of vertiginous capitalist expansion in the region, and indeed in Madrid and in the Basque Country as well – an expansion fueled largely by the authoritarian regime’s ability to provide an attractive climate for global capitalist accumulation, insofar as the regime could credibly promise an ability to effectively maintain and reproduce order while simultaneously providing a pliant and very low wage labor force, located quite close geographically to the advanced European capitalist core. In a word, the region’s capitalist expansion was built upon these internal-migrant laborers’ backs. Furthermore, the clandestine labor movement which many immigrant laborers helped construct would constitute by far the most consistent and strongest force in the opposition to the regime, their numbers in the region dwarfing those of middle- class nationalist organizations.
The influx of immigration into Catalonia during the Franco period was met with apprehension in nationalist quarters, with some even attributing it to a deliberate strategy on the part of the regime to
“de-nationalize” the territory by diluting the local population. Such conspiracy theories can be traced to the nationalist militant Manuel Cruells, a man who had been a member of the quasi-fascist
Juventuts de l’Estat Català during the second republic and who came to lead the Front Nacional de
Catalunya in the 1960’s. In 1965, Cruells would publish a book with the title Els no catalans i nosaltres (1965). In the book, he would reproach large portions of the Castilian-speaking immigrant community for what he judged to be their collaborationist attitudes with respect to the Franco regime’s policies of linguistic and cultural persecution. Soon others in Cruell’s milieu were willing to advance more explicitly conspiratorial claims. For example, in 1966, Joan Ferrater would argue that
12 the influx of immigration to Catalonia could not be considered a consequence of economic expansion alone; rather, it reflected a “definite strategy of occupation” and of “espanyolització” being pursued by the regime (Quoted in Santamaría 1999: 17). And in the same year, Antoni Peyrí would dramatically proclaim: “Be on the alert, Catalans! The current infiltration of Castilians that is being fostered by the Franco regime as a means of getting rid of the Catalan national problem might prove more nefarious than either direct and ostentatious pressures from the political order or even military attacks” (Quoted in Hall 1979: 104).
Nevertheless, such “fifth-column” arguments were not to gain ascendancy within mainstream nationalist discourse. Instead, Jordi Pujol’s alternative formulation – that the phenomenon of immigration represented both a problem and a source of hope for Catalonia, in the sense that it brought serious cultural, linguistic and even spiritual complications for the Catalan people at the same time that it brought crucial economic benefits – would become hegemonic.10 In recognition of the logic of capitalist accumulation at work in the region, and of its dependence upon the continued inflow of cheap migrant labor, Jordi Pujol famously and “generously” extended the discursive boundaries of Catalan identity to include all who “live and work in Catalonia,” so long as they have the “will to be Catalans.” The influx of immigrants could not and should not be stopped. The march of capitalist development must continue. Given these circumstances, the only practical task at hand for true Catalan patriots was to get to work at “integrating” the “new Catalans” (Colomer 1986). By the time of the transition to democracy this “integrationist” formula had become dominant within the regional-nationalist movement, at least at the level of its official discursive repertoire, though primordialist distinctions between “xarnegos” and “catalans de la ceba” were hardly erased, and
10 Of course, Pujol was not alone in articulating this position. In fact, Joaquim Maluquer would apply “the methods of Sauvy, which measure the profitability of workers by their age, in order to analyze the economic contribution of immigration to the Catalan economy;” and he would arrive at rather optimistic conclusions. Similarly, Enric Muntaner would find that “the maintenance of the relative economic weight of Catalonia has only been possible due to immigration, because such immigration has allowed for the entrance of variable capital (i.e. labor power) and thus compensated for the lack of investment in research with respect to new technologies for Catalan industry.” See the discussion on the subject in Gassiott, “Analasi històrica i sociològica de la immigració a Catalunya des de la postguerra fins els anys setanta: un estudi bibliogràfic,” (unpublished, pp.17-21). And Martínez-Marí would go so far as to refer to immigration as “un bon negoci” and “un gran benefici.” See Hall 1979:107. 13 indeed remained quite current at the level of popular visions and divisions of the social world (Barrera
González 1986; Delgado Ruíz 1998).
The Discourse of “Pujolisme”
Pujol’s famous reformulation has often been quoted as proof of the allegedly benign, even progressive, nature of contemporary Catalan nationalism and of hegemonic conceptions of contemporary Catalan identity (cites). The dominant rhetorical idiom in Pujol’s discourse remains that of romanticism – not surprisingly, it turns out that willingness to learn to live in the Catalan language is what Pujol means by the “will to be Catalan.”
Jordi Pujol first came to prominence in 1960 as a figure in the opposition after having been imprisoned and tortured by the regime for his role in organizing a protest in the form of the singing of
El Cant de la Senyera, considered by many to be Catalonia’s national hymn, at an act held at the
Palau de la Música in Barcelona, in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the
Catalan poet-cum-symbol of regional sentiment, Joan Maragall. Pujol became a symbol of the Catalan nationalist movement, whose persecution proved capable of mobilizing significant segments of the
Catalan middle classes, segments that had previously remained quiescent, to make a stance against the régime. For Pujol was far from the proto-typical political prisoner. Rather, he was a respectable young man with conservative social values and a prestigious occupation (a medical doctor), both of which made it particularly easy for relatively-privileged portions of Catalan society to identify with him.11
Pujol would play an important role in the transition to democracy as the leader of the center-right
Catholic and Catalan nationalist conservative coalition, Convergència i Unió (CiU). After the restoration of democracy and of regional autonomy, Pujol would lead CiU to five successive electoral victories at the regional level, and would thus personally oversee the construction of the Catalan public administration as well as the “Catalanization” of public life. Both during and after his long
11 De Riquer and Culla, ibid. p.303; López Barrio, ibid. p.32; Baiges and Reixach, ibid. pp.152-153. 14 tenure as President of the Generalitat (1980-2003), Jordi Pujol’s program for “normalization,” with its imperative of “integration” would be hegemonic in the region. Successive governments have continued forward along a path first forged by him. For these reasons, a brief summary of the discursive repertoire of pujolisme, a term frequently used to refer to Pujol’s still-hegemonic romantic and essentialist formulation of the Catalanist political project is in order here.
Pujol’s main goal is the “national reconstruction” of Catalonia, conceived as a debilitated nation, especially after forty years of Franquist political and cultural repression (Calzada and Llorens 1995:
181-218). It is in accordance with this ambition that the linguistic and cultural “nation-building” policies implemented under his leadership have to be understood. Like his romantic predecessors, for
Pujol a people or a nation “is a fact of mentality, of language, of feeling. It is an historical fact, which has historical vocation, and it also is a fact of an ethnical spirituality. It is finally a fact of willpower”
(Pujol 1996: 138).
According to Pujol, well beyond family ties, or any other source of individual identity, it is only the nation which is able to fulfill human aspirations: “The detached man –detached from his people, his environ, his social class- does not make any sense. It is an absurdity … People need .. to be able to cultivate more durable values, something more than human live. More important … [they need] a mentality, coherence. They need a reason for being here ... aside from the otherworldly reason. They need a more ample projection that the immediate family. The national community satisfies all these needs of the human being [but this only happens if the national community] is spiritually strong and well-structured in social terms,” (Pujol 1996: 155-6).
For a nation to be spiritually strong, it needs “a collective mystique, something that vertebrates it, and endows it with a meaning … something that can only be above the very same people” (Pujol 1996:
140). This collective mystique is grounded in history and language, for if “language is not the only keystone [of the being of a people], it is a very important one. And quite often, the most important.
And in the case of Catalonia, it is certainly the most important” (Pujol 1996: 180). So much so, that if
15 the Catalan nation still exists, no matter all the suffering caused by its subordination to the Spanish state, and the inflow of Castilian immigrants, it is because the loyalty of its people to its language.
If the survival of the Catalan nation depends on the fortune of its language, there is no question about what is requested from the Castilian speaking immigrants. Assimilation, a term with negative connotations, is not a solution. Instead, he recommends integration. Accordingly, the policies of
“linguistic normalization” and “national reconstruction” later pursued by during and after Pujol’s tenure as President of the Generalitat have had as one of their main stated goals precisely the
“integration” of internal migrants, and of especially their offspring, into the linguistic and cultural practices of Catalan society – in a word, their “inclusion” into the Catalan nation.
By “integration,” Pujol means “the casting that has to be accomplished in order to obtain a single people,” with no concession to other national or linguistic identities being its goal “that everybody becomes one, and only one single people” (Pujol 1996: 217). To say it in a different way: “the basic idea of integration is a national idea, which is total, global” (Pujol 1996: 209). Integration by means of the learning, daily use and transmission to their children of the Catalan language, is the most telling proof of the expected willingness of Castilian speakers to integrate, i.e. to assist the Catalan national reconstruction project: “language is a decisive factor in the integration of immigrants to Catalonia. It is the most definite … The language is … the surest and most common way to demonstrate our adhesion … and our fidelity to Catalonia” (Pujol: 1976:83).
The integration of immigrants is therefore not conceived as the integration of newcomers to an open, multicultural society, where identity allegiances and language practices are the result of individual choices, part and parcel of a complex society, but to a community conceived in essentialist, primarily linguistic terms, that seeks to attain not at variety, nor even two, but “a single mentality, program, criteria … [A community which has] the same worldview, the same reflexes [that is] a healthy people, well formed, and endowed with a basic unity [that prevents it from] being beaten up by paralyzing doubts” (Pujol 1996: 157).
16
Moreover, from the outset, the “pujolista” project of “integration” has demanded a militant vigilance of native Catalans of their culture, construed in essentialist (primarily linguistic) terms. According to
Pujol, successful integration requires the integrating people to be “assertive, solid, and well defined in its values” (Pujol 1996: 214). Only when such conditions are met can the integrating people bestow the relatively unassertive, flimsy, or culturally deprived people with the necessary sense of unity and mental organization required for leading a meaningful life.
Thus, lurking underneath Pujol’s essentialist formulation of the “integrationist” program, there can be detected significant undercurrents of beliefs about cultural superiority and projections of xenophobic fears. Indeed, the project implicitly relies upon a hierarchical evaluation of the relative value of the integrating and integrated peoples.
In his early pronouncements on the subject, before the transition to democracy, such implicit hierarchical evaluations were on occasion rendered explicit by Pujol – for example, when he describes the Andaluz immigrants to whom he had “generously” extended the invitation to become “new
Catalans” in decidedly unflattering terms:
“The Andaluz man is not a coherent man; rather, he is an anarchical man. He is a
destroyed man … He is, generally, an unformed man, who has lived for hundreds of
years with hunger and in a state of ignorance and cultural, mental, and spiritual misery.
He is an un-rooted man, incapable of having a broad sense of community. He sometimes
displays evidence of being made of good raw human material, but for the most part he is
the least worthy spiritual and social specimen on offer in Spain. As I said before: he is a
destroyed and anarchical man. If he were to come to dominate numerically, before
having overcome his own perplexity, he would destroy Catalonia. He would introduce
his poor and anarchical mentality, that is, his lack of mentality” (1976: 65-68).
17
Such explicit appeals to chauvinist and xenophobic depictions of Andaluz-cum-Catalan workers would become less frequent in the democratic period. Even so, these reactionary undercurrents have not infrequently re-emerged to the surface, for example, in the form of polemical statements issued from regional authorities. Illustrative in this regard is the case of Aína Moll, who, right after being appointed by Pujol to be the first head of the Department of Linguistic Policy, would openly declare that immigrants “have no culture” (El Viejo Topo, December 1980, p. 11). More recently, Pujol has left it to his wife, Marta Ferrusola, to voice such crude formulations (find quote). Meanwhile, Pujol himself has become somewhat more circumspect, preferring to openly criticize the internal migrants no longer for their alleged “anarchic mentality” or “lack of mentality,” but rather, for their alleged role as “objective instruments” of Castilian aggression against the Catalan people and language (Pujol
**en Voltas 205).
In either formulation, nevertheless, the form of consciousness revealed and perpetuated remains one reminiscent of so many xenophobic nightmares, rife with demographic anxieties expressed in terms of the imminent danger of the drowning of one’s culture amidst a sea of uncivilized aliens (Shafir 1995).
Demographic Stability and Pujolista Hegemony
The transition to democracy coincided with a reversal of fortunes on the economic front, as the
Spanish economy proved incapable of escaping the general economic malaise of the 1970’s, triggered by the OPEC crisis and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods regime of capital controls, which together signified the end of the so-called “Golden Age of Capitalism” for the advanced capitalist core. This economic downturn would profoundly and directly condition micro-nationalist dynamics in Catalonia in at least two ways: first, by abruptly ending the wave of immigration to the region; and second, by simultaneously rendering employment opportunities increasingly difficult to come by.
Such was the economic context in which Catalan nationalist mobilization made impressive strides towards capturing hegemony in the region alongside the rebirth of regional autonomy for Catalonia,
18 itself a constituent component of the constitutional consensus that crowned and consolidated the country’s elite-led pacted transition to democracy.
The Catalan economy would eventually pick up again, though employment opportunities would remain quite scarce, as the region would consistently register official unemployment levels around
20% throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s. Concomitant with this eventual pick-up, there would be an extension of social rights and basic services provided in exchange for the
“rationalization” and “modernization” of the Spanish economy by the nominally socialist governments of Felipe González that ruled the country from the early eighties through the mid- nineties, as well as an influx of European cohesion funds that did much to facilitate the growth of the south of Spain.12 Together, these developments meant that neither the “pull” nor the “push” mechanisms that had underlain the previous internal-migratory wave to the region would be triggered anew.
The consequences were particularly propitious for the “integrationist” aspirations of the micro- nationalist movement that captured control of the emergent Catalan executive and legislature, and managed to man the emergent autonomous state institutions with cadres from its core constituency of support committed to “building” or “reconstructing” a Catalan nation.
Such demographic stability, which lasted up through the mid-nineties, rendered at least plausible (if not necessarily viable) the goal of targeting the children of the Castilian-speaking working class for
“integration” into the Catalan language practices and identity. In a word, demographic stability was an essential precondition for the policies of so-called linguistic “normalization” to stand a chance of halting or reversing the hegemony of the Castilian language at the level of the Catalan street.
Beginning in the mid-nineties and lasting through the onset of the current financial crisis, associated with the period of asset-priced Keynesian expansion driven by the country’s housing market bubble, a new of migration, this time transnational, began to arrive on the scene, mostly occupying niches in
12 On the extension of social rights alongside “rationalization” under González, see Bermeo (1994), Gunther, Montero, and Botella (2004), and Maravall (1995). 19 low-paying construction, agriculture, and domestic service jobs (López and Rodríguez 2011). There are certainly indications that this latest wave of immigration, including a very high proportion of Latin
American native Spanish-speakers alongside significant numbers of North Africans and Eastern
Europeans, has already begun to trigger several types of xenophobic responses, among Castilian- speaking and Catalan-speaking citizens alike. Predictably enough, this new wave of immigration has led to a resurgence of discourse reflecting concerns about the “existential threat” to the Catalan language, and therefore nation, posed by the presence of the newcomers.
The Shifting Discourse of Language Rights in the Educational System
Since the transition to democracy and the rebirth of regional autonomy, language policy in the Catalan educational system has frequently been justified in terms of the vital interests of children in the educational system. The terms of the debate over these vital interests have changed in ways suggestive of the distinction between rationalisation and reason-giving, or alternatively, a dialectical expansion of aspirations in accordance with the logic of different phases of nationalist mobilization.
There has been a consistent appeal to the end of equal opportunity, though the means needed to provide this end have shifted in the course of justifying progressive steps in the process of
“Catalanization.”
At the time of the transition to democracy, when Castilian was still the main language of instruction in
Catalonia’s educational system at both the primary and the secondary levels, prominent proponents of
“Catalanization” appealed to psychological evidence allegedly demonstrating the particular harms to children caused by primary education in a language other than in one’s “mother tongue” (Prieto de
Pedro 1998). With the clear advances in “Catalanization” that accompanied the transfer of power over education and the passage of the first law of linguistic normalization, and thus the consolidation of an “intensive” core of schools instructing exclusively in Catalan, attention soon shifted to the need to expand the space of Catalan in other schools outside this “intensive” core, especially those situated in neighborhoods and towns in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, where the children of working class internal migrants from poorer regions in Spain were heavily concentrated, and indeed often
20 constituted an overwhelming demographic majority (Artigal 1989). Proponents of “Catalanization” consequently began to stress the need to “integrate” Castilian-speakers, now no longer stressing the psychological advantages of learning in one’s mother tongue but instead stressing sociolinguistic evidence to the contrary about the alleged comparative pedagogical advantages of early “immersion” into a second language (Serra 1997; Vila and Siguan 1998). Then, as “immersion” programs spread and the dominance of the Catalan language was consolidated as the language of instruction in all primary and (eventually) all secondary schools in the region, appeals to the “integrative” functions of
Catalan as the language of instruction were increasingly explicitly accompanied by appeals to a territorial principle as well: by which the Catalan language, in virtue of its status as llengua pròpia or sometimes llengua nacional, rightly occupies such hegemonic space (Puig Salellas 1995, Levin
2010).
Such appeals to the alleged harms or benefits of different policy regimes regarding the language of instruction in the schools have been an intrinsic part of the process of democratic legitimation of the
“Catalanization” of the educational system (and of the public sphere more generally) that the region has witnessed over the past generation, since the transition to democracy.
Part Two: The Evolution of Language Policy in the Educational System
The Construction of the “Escola Catalana”
Control over educational and linguistic policies constituted two of the core demands of the nationalist movement in Catalonia at the time of the transition to democracy. These demands were embraced by the democratic opposition throughout Spain, partly in recognition of the Republican precedent of educational and cultural autonomy that had been rolled back by the Franco regime, in accordance with its unitary and homogenizing conception of the Spanish nation-state and of Spanish national culture.
21
In the institutional and legal framework provided by the 1978 Constitution and the 1979 Catalan
Statute of Autonomy, the Catalan nationalist demands for regional control over educational and linguistic policies were in large part conceded. Indeed, such concessions proved crucial for the successful incorporation of the the Catalan nationalist movement into the Constitutional consensus
(Bonime-Blanc 1984, Oñate 1998).
Under the leadership of Jordi Pujol, the Catalan nationalist movement would capture control over the regional parliament, which it would exercise in the building of regional administrative structures – infused with a commitment to the political project of re-constructing the Catalan nation. Since the transition, regional governing and administrative apparatus has consistently used its power to pursue a concerted interventionist effort by to propel forward the process of nationalist mobilization in the region. The effort has been centered on language policies, principally in the compulsory educational system, and in the regulation of and the provision of large subsidies for the mass media under regional control. It has been implemented and reinforced by the manning of the regional and local administrations with native and nationalist middle strata of the ethno-linguistically diverse population, thanks in large part to linguistic prerequisites for jobs in the public sector.
Let us now trace the most important moments in the process of “Catalanization” of the educational system during the post-Franquist democratic period.
In May 1975, half a year before Franco’s death, the regime passed a decree that allowed for the introduction of Catalan language in the Catalan school system. This decree complied with the spirit of the 1970 General Education Bill, which recommended the introduction of “native languages” in primary schools (Arenas 1989: 25-55). This decree also tried to catch up with the course of events in
Catalonia, where some private schools were already teaching Catalan in a tolerated, though not strictly legal fashion. In 1977 the central government restored the Generalitat, -the government of
Catalonia, and its President, Josep Tarradellas, returned to Barcelona after almost forty years of exile.
By then, more than one thousands certified teachers were instructing Catalan language in more than five hundred schools, public and private. Originally, the courses and exams to obtain the teaching
22 certificate were administered by a private organization, the Delegaciò d’Ensenyament en Català, sponsored by Ómnium Cultural. In 1978, the Generalitat created the Servei d’Ensenyament en Català, which absorbed the leadership and staff of the Delegaciò. A June 1978 decree of the central government established the compulsory teaching of Catalan in primary, secondary and professional school of Catalonia. Shortly after, a popular referendum sanctioned the 1978 Spanish constitution.
The Constitution decentralized the country’s government institutions, with the establishment of 17
Autonomous communities, endorsed the official status of Castilian all over Spain -as well as the duty to know it by all Spanish citizens, the protection of the “linguistic varieties” spoken in country, and the co-officiality of Spanish and the regional language in those Autonomous Regions which had one.
The first elections for the Catalan parliament were held in 1980. These elections inaugurated the two decades long rule of Jordi Pujol and his coalition party Covergéncia i Unió in Catalonia.
In agreement with the Spanish constitution, the 1979 Catalan Statute established Catalan as the official language, together with Castilian. Although both of them were co-official languages, the
Statute granted the two languages different statuses, implicitly favoring Catalan. Whereas Catalan was made official because it was the “own/proper language” of Catalonia (llengua pròpia), -i.e. the mother language of the Catalan people, Castilian was official only because the Spanish constitution required so. The inclusion of the qualifier “own/proper” in the 1979 Catalan Statute was very much in line with the romantic and essentialist nationalist discourse discussed above, whereby the “proper” language of a territory is not the language or languages actually spoken by the people living in the territory, but only of that section of the population whose ancestors have been living in that territory for centuries - i.e. whereby the familiar triad Volk, Sprache, und Boden takes its full meaning. The 1979 Catalan statute, though, was sufficiently ambiguous to assure both its constitutionality and its ultimate approval by a majority of the population. Thus, in order to compensate for the symbolically privileged status of Catalan vis-à-vis Castilian, article 3.3 of the Statute declared that the Catalan government would “guarantee the normal and official use of the two languages and adopt the necessary measures to ensure their knowledge and create conditions which will permit attaining their full equality.”
23
The first elections for the Catalan parliament were held in 1980. These elections inaugurated the two decades long rule of Jordi Pujol and his coalition party Covergència i Unió in Catalonia. One of the first measures of Pujol’s government was the creation of the General Directorate of Linguistic Policy, which in line with the electoral platform of CiU, oriented to “recatalinize Catalonia,” had as its main goal to “normalize” the use of the Catalan language, which had to be attained through the provisions of an specific Law of Linguistic Normalization.
Since the combined forces of the nationalists parties, Convergéncia i Unió and Esquerra Republicana, were not enough to obtain the absolute majority in the Catalan Parliament, they had to reach a consensus with the Catalan left-wing parties (PSC –Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya, and
Communist PSUC-Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya), and, if necessary with the centrist CC-
UCD, and the tiny Andalusian Socialist Party, on the terms of the proposed Law. Three years of intense negotiations, which attests to the conflictive character of the linguistic issue, were necessary to reach a consensus. Initially, the stance of the two nationalist parties was to create a dual network of
Catalan and Castilian schools, in line with the model of Quebec. In the long term, however,
Convergència i Unió’s plan was to gradually “Catalanize” the Castilian school network, by making
Catalan the predominant language of instruction. On their side, PSC and PSUC were radically opposed to the creation of a dual school network, since they feared it would lead to the partition of the
Catalan population into “two linguistic communities.” Alternatively, they advocated for a school system which guaranteed, at least during the first years of primary education, the right to choose the language of instruction, with a view, however, to allow for the progressive Catalanization of the school system, with no other limits than those imposed by the Spanish constitution. Thus, even when there was an initial disagreement regarding the creation or not of a dual system, both nationalist and left-wing parties agreed against a bi-lingual education system, where both Castilian and Catalan could be on a par. Instead, their preference was for an education system that allowed for the ascendancy of
24
Catalan over Castilian, even when the mother tongue of the majority of children was not Catalan, and that the constituency of the left-wing parties was mainly Castilian speaking immigrants.13
The endorsement of this policy by the leadership of the Catalan left-wing parties, which in the long term aimed at the universal establishment of the “escola catalana,” -i.e. a school system not only entrusted with the teaching of the Catalan language, but also with the transmission of ambiguously defined Catalan contents-, can be explained by the ethnic turn of the European left that initiated at the end of the 1960’s. This turn explains the division of labor within the PSC, where, traditionally, leadership positions have been reserved to autochthonous pro-nationalist and Catalan speaking professionals, with rank-and-file mostly composed of first, or second generations of working class
Castilian speaking immigrants.14 This ethnic turn, though, was not embraced by all members of the
Catalan left. Even when there was a broad consensus about the need to counterbalance the repressive linguistic measures of the Franco regime, there was still a vivid tradition among some sectors of the left highly suspicious of all kind of political discourses that could question universalist and egalitarian principles -which naturally encompassed nationalist and ethnic ones. It is from this tradition that the first skirmish took place.
In January 1981, a manifesto signed by 2,000-plus people was released to the press. The Manifesto for the Equality of Linguistic Rights in Catalonia, or, as it was later called the Manifesto of the 2,300, defended the co-officiality of both languages, as well as the need to protect the Catalan language after decades of persecution. The undersigned reminded that most Catalan people were bilingual, and expressed that this linguistic wealth could only benefit Catalan culture and society. They expressed concern about some political developments which were indicative of a policy that aimed at substituting the common bilingualism of the Catalan people by a Catalan monolingualism. Contrary to
13 For the position of the autochthonous Socialists and the Communists, see the intervention of Marta Mata in the 1980 Conference on Migration and National Reconstruction in Catalonia (AAVV: 1980: 137-45), and Arguelaget (1996: 156-7), respectively. 14 Data on the linguistic divide between leaders and members of the PSC, see Colomé (1996: 18, Table 11). For the ideological gap between leaders and members regarding Catalan nationalism, see Miley (2007). The ‘ethnic turn’ of the 1960’s does not represent such an ideological fracture in the PSUC, used to taking at its face value the ethno-nationalist discourse employed by Lenin and Stalin to nail down their control of the populations of Soviet Union. 25 the quite adamant attitude against bilingualism of the former leadership of the Delegaciò d’Ensenyament en Català -now incorporated to the Servei d’Ensenyament of the Generalitat (see
Arenas 1998: 50-5), the undersigned argued for a bilingual school system that would equally respect the linguistic rights of both Catalan and Castilian children. The Manifesto rounded up all these arguments with a call to “defend a pluralist, democratic, and non-totalitarian conception of the
Catalan society, based on the principles of freedom and mutual respect. A society in which it is possible to be Catalan, have roots in Catalonia and love Catalonia, no matter the language one speaks”.15 The Manifesto aimed directly at the heart of the one-nation-one-language premise which laid the foundation of the national reconstruction project, but, more important, it was a call for attention to leaders of the left-wing parties, at the time negotiating the Law of Linguistic Policy, who, according to the undersigned, were imbued by a discourse not much different from that of the nationalists.
Since it was undersigned by members of the Socialist Teachers Union (FETE-UGT), as well as by both Castilian and Catalan speaking intellectuals who in the previous years had taken part in the opposition movement against Franco, the Manifesto produced a little bit of a shock in Catalan politics.
It prompted some moderate nationalists to recommend a more tolerant linguist policy. Thus, for example, the former president of the Generalitat, Josep Tarradellas claimed that “language, in this case Catalan, should not be imposed on anyone. That’s what Franco did with Castilian ” (qtd in
Shabad and Gunther 1981: 469, see also his letter to the editor of La Vanguardia, April 16, 1981).
The response of less moderate nationalists, however, was more hostile. Thus, for example, Heribert
Barrera, President of the Catalan Parliament, stated that “what we have to do now is to disparage the attitude of that people and ignore what they say in their Manifesto” (La Vanguardia, March 14, p. 7).
More important, the Manifesto triggered the emergence of the Crida a la Solidaritat en defense de la llengua, la cultura i la nació catalanes (Call to Solidarity in defense of the Catalan language, culture and nation). The Crida was a nationalist counter-movement which incorporated more radical views than those held by Convergència i Unió, and Esquerra Republicana, For almost fifteen years, until its
15 The Manifesto is reproduced in Voltas (1996: 249-54). On the political climate and linguistic conflict in Catalonia in the immediate years before the enactment of 1983 Law, see Shabad and Gunther (1981). 26 partial co-optation by Esquerra, and eventual demise a little later, the Crida sustained a variety of campaigns for the Catalan language and nation, and against what it perceived as the “aggressive nationalism” of the signatures of the Manifesto and likeminded people (Monné and Selga 1991: 31).
As it stated in its opening Manifesto, the Crida pledged to “guarantee … the observation of the rights of the non-Catalan speaking immigrants, as well as their voluntary integration to the common task of the national reconstruction [of Catalonia], under a climate of pacific conviviality” (Monné and Selga
1991: 33), for which it campaigned for the official acknowledgement of the Catalan as the only language of the territory, and conducted various initiatives against bi-lingualism, and conversational code swift (Monné and Selga 1991: 107. See El País, April 29, 1985). Finally, a totally different kind of reaction to the Manifesto has to be mentioned. Four months after its release, members of the terrorist group Terra Lluire shot one of the first undersigned of the Manifesto, Federico Jiménez
Losantos, in the knee. This was the first violent attack perpetrated by the still unknown Terra Lluire organization. All political parties decried the attack, but Jiménez Losantos, as well as other undersigned left Catalonia. This was the end of the group that sponsored the Manifesto (Santamaría
1999: 42-3).
It was in this environment that the members of Catalan Parliament were trying to make progress about the spirit of the Law of Linguistic Normalization. The Law was finally passed in 1983. In its Section
2, devoted to the education system, the Law finally excluded the establishment of two separate networks of Catalan and Castilian schools. It also acknowledged the official status of both languages and languages of instruction. Since the Law stated as its goal that all children ended up their primary education with a correct knowledge of both Catalan and Castilian. The 1983 Law also allowed for the right of children to receive their first two years of primary education in their mother language. This
Law was ambiguously enough to obtain the unanimous approval of all political parties. Thus, the Law did not establish its final aim: it did not make it clear what would it mean a successful
“normalization” of the Catalan language (Colomer 1990: 188, Branchadell 1996). Thus, and regarding education, it established the primacy of the Catalan language by making it “the normal vehicle of expression of the schools, regarding both its teaching as well its internal and external activities”, it
27 also stated the Catalan government “will guarantee the normal and official use of the two languages and adopt measures necessary to assure their knowledge, and will create conditions which will permit attaining their full equality.” Similarly, even when the Law endorsed the right of parents to choose - although only at the primary school level-, the language of instruction for their children, it did not specify how this right was going to be enforced. The Law was so ambiguously drafted that it could encompass a school system where Castilian speaking children would receive most of their primary education in their mother language, to a quite different one where, granted their parents’ approval, they would first learn to read and write in the Catalan language, and later receive most of their education in the same language. The 1983 Law, would take its final shape at the implementation level, by means of the Decrees, Orders and directives issued by Generalitat and its Department of
Education’s staff (Arguelaguet 1996: 157).
Given that 1983 Law rejected the establishment of a dual network system, the real issue was about the degree to which Catalan was going to be introduced in the classroom. The staff of the Department of
Education was definitively for a curriculum which maximized the number of teaching hours in
Catalan under the idea that a more balanced distribution between Castilian and Spanish would not help Catalan language to become the “normal” language of Catalonia. After some initial Decrees of the Catalan government, and the approval by the Spanish Parliament of the 1990 General Law of
Educational, which also affected the Catalan school system, the 95/1992 Catalan Decree finally established the minimum of teaching hours that primary school students had to have in Catalan and
Castilian languages. The minimum amounted to 8 per cent of the total teaching hours for each language. Under these conditions, it was possible to have, for example, a school which only provided for the required minimum of teaching hours in Catalan language, and extended the scope of Castilian to the remaining hours. This would be a “school of maximun Castilianization.” But the Decree aimed at the opposite direction, and sought for maximum Catalanization. Table 1 shows the evolution of this maximizing Catalization drive in the school system. Whereas in the1984-85 school year only one fourth of primary school students attended a “maximally Catalanized school” (escola de catalanizació
28 maxima), eight years later they represented three quarters of the total of the primary school population.
Table 1. Distribution of primary school students by the Catalanization level of their schools.
1984-85 1986-87 1989-90 1992-93
Maximum 23.3 % 42.5 % 56.4 % 72.9%
Medium N/A 33 % 33.6 % 23.6%
Minimum N/A 24.5 % 9.9% 3.4%
Source: Arguelaguet (1996: 75).
This rapid transformation of the classrooms inevitably produced some problems with Castilian speaking families. More problematic was the mechanism introduced to endorse the right of the parents to choose the language of instruction for their children in their first two years of education. In practical terms, and given that, by default, Catalan was the normal language of instruction, the parents had to officially request the enforcement of this right to the Department of Education and/or the
School Board were they children were enrolled. Some claimed that this was a purposefully clumsy and discouraging process, especially given the ideological bias of the teachers and personnel of the
Servei d’Ensenyanment. But more annoying was the mechanism of “individualized attention,” devised to enforce this right. Basically, in a classroom conducted by default in Catalan,
“individualized attention” meant that the teacher has to answer in Castilian to the questions that a
Castilian speaking child might dare to raise. In the words of Castilian speaking mother: “This is nonsense. Anything that boils down to making a child feel different or marking him is an aberration, it is inhuman. I do not recommend individualized attention, because it marks the child, and this is more traumatic than asking him to learn in a language that is not his language” (Voltas 1996: 70).
29
Behind these concerns there was also some apprehension regarding the possible instrumentalisation of the so-called “escola catalana” as an indoctrination agency. This suspicion was not ungrounded. The rapid transformation of the Catalan school system meant an equally rapid substitution of Castilian speaking teachers by Catalan speaking ones. More concretely, from the 1980-81 to the 1985-86 academic years, 24 percent of primary school teachers, unwilling or unable to obtain the Catalan
Teaching Certificate left the region (Argelaguet 1996: 202).16 Also, given the urge to blend “quality and ‘Catalanity’” (qualitat i catalanitat) in the educational system, as it has been “throughout the history of this country” (Arenas 1990: 32), it is no surprise that the resulting ideological profile of the teachers of Catalan children widely diverges from that of their parents, be they Catalan or Castilian speakers (see Table 2). It did not help much to assuage the apprehension of some parents that Joaquim
Arenas, the head of the Servei d’Ensenyanment en Catala and driving for of the Catalan immersion program did not seem much prone to promote an ideologically neutral discourse in the school system.
On the contrary, as he mentioned: “with regard to the linguistic issue, the education system should, it seems to me, offer the habits, the conscience, the loyalty and even the linguistic pride. And we are working on this. We should not give speeches to the children. We have to place them in circumstances that lead to this end.” (AA.VV.: 1994: 236).17
Table 2. Self-identification by linguistic groups of the general population and teachers.
Only More Equally More Only DK/D Tota
Spanis Sp. & Catala Catala A l Spanis h Cat. n n h
Castilian
16 The terrorist organization Terra Lluire also contributed to this outcome by sending letters to Castilian speaking teachers requesting them to leave Catalonia (Argelaguet 1996:19). 17 Although this apprehension about the possible socialization of the escola catalana into nationalist values could not be conformed at the time, current data shows a strong positive correlation between exposure to Catalan in the school and Catalan self-identity. Thus in their study of identity formation, and through the exploitation of within- and between cohort variation, Clots-Figueras and Masella (2009) show that the effect of Catalan exposure is so strong as to balance out the role of family in the cultural transmission of national identities. See also Aspachs-Bracons, et. al. (2008).
30
General 27.8 10.7 43.2 13.1 3.6 1.6 100 population
Teachers 15 8.3 53.3 11.7 6.7 5 100
Catalan
General 1.3 1.3 20.2 41.8 34.4 1 100 population
Teachers 0 0 8.8 30.8 59.3 1.1 100
Source: Miley (2007 :11).
Escalation of Commitment.
The implementation of the Decree by way of maximizing the number of schools where the use of
Catalan as the language of instruction were itself maximized, was the first sign of a turning point in the development of linguistic policy of the Generalitat. Whereas the ambiguous 1983 Law of
Linguistic Normalization did not elaborate what would exactly mean an eventual “normalization” of the Catalan language in Catalonia, in the early 1990’s a new more ambitious goal was considered and finally approved. If, initially, the goal of the language policy was that anybody who wanted to live in
Catalan could do so, a more ambitious goal was to make sure that everybody lived in Catalan. To say it in other words, whereas the first goal accepted that those who wanted to live their lives in Castilian could do so, the second scenario implied a diglossic situation, with Castilian was to be reduced to the status of family or primary group language. Aïna Moll, the first head of the Directorate of Linguistic
Policy claimed, the ideal scenario would be one in which “every normal interaction is performed in
Catalan,” a desideratum which shared her successor, Miquel Reniu. For Reniu, and given the inconceivability for whom the ideal situation would be that Catalan becomes the “common and habitual [language] in personal and working relations” (Brancahadell 1997: 164, see also La
Vanguardia, Nov., 2, 1991, p. 17). Although the hegemonic status of Catalan had traditionally been the ultimate goal of the Catalan nationalist discourse, political expediency advocated not to place it at the forefront of the linguistic policy in its initial stages. But in the early 1990’s, and given the absence
31 of an organized, and politically relevant opposition coming from Castilian speakers, and more important perhaps, given the strong recommendations coming from linguists, who claimed that
Catalan could not survive vis-à-vis Castilian unless the latter were reduced to family or primary group communication (Branchadell 1996: 22-4), the governing party, Convergència i Unió thought it was the time to escalate its commitment with Catalanization, and reduce the former ambiguity –if not at the official discourse level, certainly at the policy implementation level, as shown by the example of the 95/1992 Decree.
This escalation of commitment had as consequence the re- emergence of an organized opposition. In
1993, some Castilian speaking parents created CADECA. They campaign against the Catalan immersion program and advocated for a more balanced weight of both Catalan and Castilian in the school system. Ten years earlier, the Cervantina, a conservative association of teachers of Spanish language had been created. Although the main goal of this association was to defend the professional interests of its members, it also included people who were clearly close to Spanish nationalist positions. Of a slightly different nature was the Asociación por la Tolerancia (Association for
Tolerance), set up in 1992. This association had a more political character. It recruited people from the left, and embedded its defense of individual linguistic rights within liberal nationalist discourse which also appealed to those Catalan speaking people who felt coaxed by the nationalist policies and rhetoric of the Generalitat. In its first Manifesto of 1994, the Asociación asked for recognition for the cultural diversity of the Catalan people, complained about the nationalist pontification about what should be ‘normal’ and not-normal regarding language practices, and the instrumentalization of language for political purposes. The Manifesto advocated for an education reform that would make it possible to choose among three school networks in imitation to the Basque system, with a Catalan-, a
Castilian-, and a mixed Catalan/Castilian school network, provided all children finished their compulsory education being bilingual. 18
18 The Manifesto is reproduced in Voltas (1996: 239-45). 32
Adding to the tension caused by the escalation of commitment of the Generalitat and the subsequent reaction from these associations was the expectation created by a ruling of Spanish Supreme Court of
February 1994. The origin of this ruling came from a suit filed by the conservative lawyer, Gómez
Rovira ,-who was also acting as the legal advisor to CADECA, that he brought to the Territorial Court of Barcelona eleven years ago. In his suit, Gómez Rovira claimed that the Constitution protected the right of his children to receive their education in Castilian. The ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court took aback the Generalitat. Probably under the influence of the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms, included in the 1982 Canadian Constitution, which extended the right of French- and
English-speaking Canadian children to receive their primary and secondary school instruction in their first language, the Spanish Supreme considered that the protection of the language rights “of even a single child” had higher value than the protection of a language or a language community, even if many could profit from the annulment of this rights “since human rights cannot be computed by sheer numbers” (Voltas 1996: 169). This sentence put into question the whole edifice of the Catalan immersion program, shaped by the Decrees that followed the ambiguous 1983 Law of Linguistic
Normalization. Given the political strain that this issue aroused, the Supreme Court decided to act cautiously, and addressed the Constitutional Court to decide not on the constitutionality of the
Decrees which implemented the 1983 Law, but of the Law itself. Nine months later, the
Constitutional Court issued its sentence. Contrary to the opinion of the Supreme Court, the
Constitutional Court stated that the right of children to receive their education in their first language is not a fundamental right. Provided that children receive their education in a language that they can understand, for which public authorities should guarantee that the child acquires a sufficient command of the school language in his first years of schooling, the fundamental right to education is properly acknowledged. Moreover, the Constitutional Court stated that the Generalitat had the right to choose the language of education, and deemed reasonable that it chose Catalan as the “gravitational center” of the school system provided that children also learn Castilian as the Constitution requires. Needless to say, thus sentence greatly satisfied the Catalan government, which saw in it not only an endorsement of its policy, but, more important, an opportunity to strengthen its commitment with its
Catalanization program. On their side, and given the “intermingling” (Kasha 1996: 675) of judicial
33 and political considerations mediating in the Court’s decision, specially, as it happened, at a time when the stability of the central government of Prime Minister Felipe González, depended on the parliamentary support of the Catalan nationalists, those opposed to Catalan immersion program did not see the 1994 sentence of Constitutional Court as grounded enough to waive their claims. Rather than settling the linguistic issue, the arguments of the Constitutional Court amplified the debate.
This debate intensified after the announcement of the Generalitat of its purpose to enact a more ambitious Linguistic Normalization Law. The announcement was a call to all interested parties to take positions. In April 1997 a group of 350 hundred intellectuals released a Manifesto, which demanded the establishment of Catalan as the only official language. Given the relative strength of
Castilian in Catalonia and, in general, as a global language, and the common tendency of people to shift to the stronger language, the signatures thought that in order to secure the future of Catalan it was necessary that it became the common language of public life, that “all manifestations of Catalan life are normally expressed in Catalan.” The undersigned emphasized the necessity of respecting the linguistic rights of individuals, although they also made clear that individual rights had to be balanced against the “territorial criterion,” which could best guarantee the survival of Catalan. The undersigned were confident that Castilian speaking population would understand the justice of their program, and advised them not to be “demagogically instrumentalised” by anti-Catalan groups, inspired by the old centralist ideas of the Franco regime, and intrinsically anti-democratic. The Manifesto finished with a defense of the value of linguistic diversity, and reminded that “a language is not only an instrument of communication; it is also a worldview, a place that configures myths and desires, a home that help those who inhabit it become a people.”19 This Manifesto was shortly responded by Foro Babel.
The Foro Babel was a discussion group composed of scholars, intellectuals and members of the
Asociación por la Tolerancia. The group initiated its activities in late 1996 with open workshops and seminars, with the goal of establishing a public arena where linguistic rights could be debated, with no regard to political correctness, and within a broader examination of the quality of democracy in
19 The Manifesto is available at http://www.cercat.com/lincaweb/htm/bases.htm,
34
Catalonia. To undertake this examination, the Foro departed from an unquestionable liberal position:
“individual citizens are the only legitimate agents of political life… From this point of view, history, language, culture or ethnic group cannot be called for to produce collective agents, eroding the basic freedoms of individuals, transforming them into passive recipients, and requiring them to on act on their behalf” (El País, February 28, 1997). In April 1997, and as response the Manifesto of the 350, the Foro Babel issued its first Manifesto. In it, the Foro agreed that the Catalan language deserved especial protection. According to Foro Babel, though, this protection should not affect the right of individuals to use one or another language. Catalans, according to Babel had equal linguistic right, no matter their mother language, or the language they identified with. The Manifesto also reminded that
Catalan society is bilingual. A democratic transposition of this reality into public life meant, according to the Manifesto, that both Spanish and Catalan native speakers could deal with the public administration, as well as in their interaction in the private sector in the language they chose to. The
Foro granted that Catalan is the own/proper language of Catalonia, but it simultaneously claimed that this status was both logically irrelevant and ethically wrong if used to sustain a policy oriented to make Catalan the only or preferred language of the population. The Manifesto advised against linguistic discrimination, and defending the right of individuals to choose their language and identity, finished positioning against the compulsory Catalan immersion program, and for equal treatment in schools for Castilian and Catalan.
As it was finally enacted the new Law of Linguist Policy of 1998 was closer to the position of the
Manifesto of the 350 than that of Foro Babel. Aiming at extending the everyday use of Catalan, the
Law was more concerned with the national reconstruction project and the collective rights of Catalan people, than to the individual rights of Catalan or, for the same matter of Castilian speakers. The
1998 Law consolidated the measures that the Generalitat had taken since the passing of the 1983 Law, and established new commitments for the near future. Thus, art 2 stated that Catalan was going to be the preferential language of public administration. Implicitly, knowledge of Catalan was made compulsory for entrance in the civil service or in public companies. It also made Catalan the default language regarding the written communication of financial institutions with their customers. The 1998
35
Law required private business both to display their signage at least in Catalan, and to guarantee that customers could be attended in Catalan. And to prevent noncompliance, the Law provided for the introduction of “linguistic fines,” as they were popularly called later. Finally, and regarding education the 1998 Law simply sanctioned the developments in the school system by simply stating that Catalan should normally be used as the language of instruction.
Although it was not unanimously passed, the 1998 “Law of Catalan,” as it was popularly known, obtained overwhelming support among members of the Catalan Parliament. Only the representatives of the conservative Partido Popular, which had mostly inherited the electorate of the former centrist
CC-UCD, and Esquerra Republicana opposed the law; because it went too far, according to the former, or was too diffident, according to the later. But this quasi-unanimous Parliamentary agreement did not duly reflect the preferences of the general public, neither Catalan, nor Castilian speaking. As Table 3 shows, there is a wide gap between Catalan politicians and the people they represent. Whereas only 5.4 of Castilian-, and 15.2 percent of Catalan speakers prefer an only-Catalan school system, this is the most preferred option among their representatives (44.7 percent). Similarly, whereas half of the general public (although with significant differences between Catalan and
Castilian speakers) prefers a school system where both languages are equally represented, only one- fifth of their representatives have the same preference. This consensus among the political elite, and the corresponding gap between the former and the general public suggests an important problem of political representation. Rather than the transposition of a popular demand, the language reversal policies enacted by the Catalan elite are indicative of a top-down national building process, very similar to those implemented with unequal success in 19th century Central Europe (Miley 2004 and
2007). As we are going to see immediately, some changes in the Catalan party system have narrowed this gap. They have not, however, helped much diminish the political tension around the language issue.
36
Table 3. Preferred linguistic model for schools by teaching hours in Castilian and Catalan.
All More Half and More All DK N
Spanis Spanis Half Catala /D Catalan h h n A
Overall
General public 0.8 4.0 50.2 33.2 9.3 2.5 1006
Teachers 0 0 22.3 36.1 41.0 0.6 166
Politicians 0 0.6 24.4 35.2 38.1 1.7 176
By mother tongue
Castilian
General public 1.3 6.5 62.8 20.9 5.4 3.1 541
Teachers 0 0 40.7 27.1 32.2 0 59
Politicians 0 0 37.7 39.6 22.6 0 53
Catalan
General public 0 0.8 32.8 49.9 15.2 1.3 387
Teachers 0 0 12.2 37.8 48.9 1.1 90
Politicians 0 0.8 18.7 33.3 44.7 2.4 123
Source: Miley (2007: 22).
The Debate over the New Statute of Autonomy
In 2003, and after six consecutive electoral victories, Jordi Pujols’ coalition party, Convergència i
Unió, had to step aside. It had obtained more parliamentary seats than any other party, but no enough to outvote the Tripartit, or three-party coalition of ICV-EA (mostly former ex-communists of the
PSUC), PSC and Esquerra Republicana. The inclusion of the latter party, more radicalized with the
37 incorporation in its ranks of former members of the Crida, gave a new impetus to the nationalist agenda of the new government. Thus, and in order to mark off its differences with pujolism, the new
Tripartit government established as its main goal the replacement of the old Catalan Statute of 1979 by a new one, oriented to emphasize the distinctive personality of Catalonia vis-à-vis Spain with a view to increase its self-governing powers vis-à-vis Spain.
Parliamentary debates on the content of new Statute began in 2004, and ended in September of the following year. With the exception of the Popular Party, which only had five percent of the total parliamentary seats, all the remaining parties approved a new version of the new Statute. In order to obtain legal effectiveness, though, this, quasi-unanimously approved new version had to be endorsed by the Spanish parliament, and, immediately after, by the Catalan people via a referendum.
Some difficulties arose when the advanced Statute reached the Spanish Parliament. On top of the opposition of the conservative Popular Party, some members of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) had some reservations on the constitutionality of the new text, as well as misgivings about the open, and 19th century-fashioned ethno-nationalist imprint that they saw in it.20 Also, some leaders of other regional governments were concerned that the new Statute would warrant Catalonia a preferential treatment vis-à-vis other regions of Spain. For the new Statute to be finally sanctioned it, the Spanish
Parliament agreed that it had to be polished and unquestionably positioned within the limits of the
Spanish Constitution.
The most important changes that the Spanish Parliament introduced in the original version drafted by the Catalan Parliament affected economic matters and, in general, issues of distribution of powers,
20 About the ethno-nationalist imprint in the proposed Statute, see the article of the historian Alvarez Junco in El País, January 15, 2006. 38 which, some feared, could negatively affect the status and negotiating position of other regional governments. Also very important was the question about the nature and identity of Catalonia. Thus, if art. 1.1. of the original text drafted by the Catalan Parliament, read that “Catalonia is a nation,” the
Spanish Parliament could only accept that Catalonia is a “nationality.” However, and in an indirect manner, the Spanish Parliament accepted the national character of Catalonia in the Preamble and especially in art.8.1 which endowed Catalonia with its own “national symbols” (i.e., flag, national holyday, and national anthem). Similarly, and although the Spanish Parliament chose to emphasize that the self-governing rights of Catalonia stemmed from the Spanish Constitution, it conceded as well that these rights were “also” derivative of “the historic rights of the Catalan people,” which in the original version of the Catalan Parliament had more weight.
Regarding language and education, and in order to avoid a more open confrontation with the Catalan
Parliament, the Parliament of Spain was much more benevolent. As advanced in the text produced by the Catalan Parliament, the Spanish Parliament accepted that Catalan citizens had the “duty” to know
Catalan, defined as the own/proper language of Catalonia. Similarly, it also accepted Catalan to become the “language of normal and preferential use in public administration, and public media, as well as the language of instruction and learning normally employed in the educational system.” This acceptance was in accordance with the Constitutional Court sentence of 2004 -which placed Catalan as the center of gravity of the educational system, as well as with the 1998 Law of Linguistic Policy, whose content was directly transliterated into the new Statute. When the Spanish Parliament put to vote the proposed changes, the obtained 55 percent of the votes of the attending representatives, which included the members of Catalan Socialist Party, and Convergéncia i Unió, who saw these changes as a lesser evil. The representatives of Esquerra Republicana, however, interpreted these changes as an illegitimate encroachment of the self-governing rights of the Catalan nation, and voted against. On its side, and just for the opposite reasons, the Popular Party also voted against, and harboring doubts about the constitutionality of some of its articles -including those affecting the language regime and the linguistic provisions for the educational school system-, submitted the new text to the Constitutional Court for review.
39
Since the Spanish political system works on the premise that, pending the final decision of the
Constitutional Court, a charge of unconstitutionality of new legislation cannot prevent the enforcement and further development of this legislation, the new Statute approved by the Spanish
Parliament could follow its own course. In this way, Catalan residents were finally convened to vote, and decide about this somehow watered down text coming from the Spanish Parliament.
Disgruntled by the not plain, and somehow tortuous acknowledgement of the “national” character of
Catalonia, and by the dilution of its historical rights as a potential touchstone for future claims for independence, Esquerra Republicana campaigned against the proposed text. But shortly before the referendum day, and after much internal debate, it recommended casting invalid votes. On their side, its two partners in the Tripartit government, the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC), and the ex-communists of ICV-EA, as well as Convérgencia i Unió campaigned for the Statute, under the conviction that, for the time being, it was the most ambitious text that the rest of the country could grant. The only parliamentary party which persistently campaigned against the proposed Statute was the Popular
Party.
Not surprisingly, given the opposition to the Statute of Esquerra Republicana and the Popular Party, the campaign and the attention of media revolved around the issues raised by these two parties, more concretely about the partially suppressed “national” character of Catalonia, and the duty to know
Catalan. A survey conducted three weeks before the referendum day (see Table 4), showed these were the two issues most of the people had heard about, contrary to other issues such as social rights. And although almost one third of the population shared the idea that the knowledge of Catalan should be a right and a duty, a quite similar proportion of the population held exactly the same idea about the
Castilian language, which attests for a clear preference for bilingualism among Catalan people. More interesting is perhaps their opinion about the characterization of Catalonia as a nation, recognized in the Statue in an indirect manner. Even when most of the media attention concentrated on this topic, the characterization of Catalonia as a nation was the issue that concerned the least the general public, which, again, illustrated the gulf between the preferences and concerns of the general population and
40 those of its representatives. A further illustration of this is the importance the Catalan public assigned to the results of the referendum, i.e. the final stage of a process that had taken up most the time and energies of their representatives for the last couple of years. Survey data can again be of help here.
They show that the electorate was almost equally split among those who expressed concern, or much concern regarding the eventual results of the referendum (46.1 percent), and those other who felt unconcerned or not at all concerned about them (42 percent).21
Table 4. Knowledge of, and opinion about some issues included in the 2006 Statute of Catalonia before the referendum -raw percentages.
Have a Have a Are Didn’t DK
positive view negative hear /D indifferen view about it A t
The section about social rights 21.8 2.3 3.7 62.3 9.7
The characterization of
Catalonia as a nation 36.3 19.8 20.7 16.7 6.5
The enlargement of decision making powers 47.4 9.4 5.3 30.2 7.8
The right and duty to know Catalan 71.4 6.4 7.4 12.1 2.8
The right and duty to know Castilian 70.3 3.9 8.2 14.6 3.1
21 According to the same CIS survey no. 2643. 41
The system of transfers and funding of 33.1 11.4 4.4 36.9 14. Catalonia 2
Source: CIS survey no. 2643. N = 1494.
This weariness manifested very clearly the day of the referendum, when only 49 percent of the electorate casted their ballots. Although the new Statute was finally approved with 74 percent of positive votes, these figures contrast with the results of the former referendum for the 1979 Statute, which accrued a turn-out rate of 60 percent, and 88 percent of positive votes. The fact that new Statute only received the support of 35 percent of the population could not easily be dismissed.
Aside from the Popular Party, members of Foro Babel also campaigned against the new Statute. Their strategy, however, changed. If initially they had worked in the periphery trying to stimulate a public debate, in 2005, when the new Tripartit government embarked in new Statute adventure, some members of Foro Babel announced that in order to have a better leverage on Catalan politics and shorten the gulf between the general public and its political representatives, they were going to create a political party. The party, Ciutadans, was established three weeks after the referendum day.
Although most of its members came from the left, and was particularly appealing to the PSC electorate who traditionally abstained in the regional elections as a consequence of the nationalist bias of its leadership, Ciutadans did not position itself as a leftist party.22 Rather, it focused on language and nationalism issues: it adhered to a strictly liberal language ideology and rejected all nationalisms,
Spanish and Catalan nationalism. The obsessive preoccupation with language and an all-embracing and open-ended national reconstruction program shared by the political elite had, according the
22 The differential support that PSC receives in Catalan and Spanish parliamentary elections has been a traditional feature of Catalan politics. On average, and from 1980 to 2004, the PSC has received in Catalan elections, 67 per cent of the total votes it obtained in elections for the Spanish Parliament, when the party is more likely to be perceived as a branch of the Spanish party rather than a Catalan nationalist, leftist party. Survey no. of CIS, conducted after the 2006 elections for the Catalan Parliament, shows that 20 percent of the electorate of Ciutadans came left-wing voters who abstained in the former regional elections. Overall, the electorate of this party was mainly Castilian speaking (89 per cent), and ideologically positioned in the center- left (with an average score of 4.4 in the 1 to 10 extreme left to extreme right scale). 42 leaders of Ciutadans vitiated the political debate and created a problem of political representation.
Universal, individual rights were, according to the leaders of Ciutadans, paramount over national rights or any national reconstruction project, always working in the direction of splitting the demos between those who agree with the project or are coxed to do so, and those others who care little; or, in the self-congratulating words of Miquel Reniu, former General Director of Linguist Policy, between first-class and second-class citizens (La Vanguardia August, 25, 1990). Rather than the preeminence of a supposedly distinctive and clear-cut national identity acting as the organizing principle of the mores and values of individuals, they emphasized the creative, multidimensional, and sometimes conflicting identities that combine in the self-definition of individuals living in modern societies.
These principles also implied a certain reticence towards multiculturalism, suspicious for questioning individual rights, and more particularly, the right to exit from one’s culture. To sum up, Ciutadans supported the right of individuals to choose their language(s) and identities, and instead of a policy oriented to substitute Catalan monolingualism for bilingualism, opted for a different one whereby individual options were granted equal respect.23
In the Catalan parliamentary elections of 2006, Ciutadans only obtained three seats. Once again,
Convérgencia i Unió was the party which obtained most seats (48), but the renewed tri-partisan agreement between the PSC, Esquerra Republicana, and ICV-EA tipped the scales (with 70 seats), which let it establish a new cabinet. The Popular Party, with only 14 representatives in the Parliament, was together with Ciutadans the only one which clearly positioned itself for a more balanced presence of the two languages in Catalan society and institutions. But the new Tripartit government had a different perspective and, more important, the possibility to make further strides in the direction of language shift that the new Statute permitted.
It was again the education policy, and the status of Castilian in the Catalan primary school system which concentrated most of the time and energy of the new Tripartit government, which, still pending the final decision of the Constitutional Court, concentrated on implementing as swiftly as possible the
23 For the ideological imprint of Ciutadans see its two foundational Manifestos, and the guiding principles (Ideario) approved in its first Congress, available in Felix de Azúa et al. (2007: 84-96, 113-16, 137-48), respectively. For a critique of multiculturalism from one the fathers of Ciutadans, see Ovejero (2006). 43 more ambitious policies that the still questioned Statute allowed. In this context, the linguistic dispute centered around the popularly called “third hour.” The dispute originated with a plea sent by an organization originally linked to the Popular Party to the Catalan Supreme Court. The appellant requested that Catalan primary schools taught the minimum weekly hours of Castilian language that a
Spanish Ministry of Education’s Decree of December 2006 specified. That decree established that primary school children should be exposed to at least 70 hours per school year of Castilian language, approximately three hours per week. But as it turned out, 95 per cent of Catalan schools did not meet this minimum requirement, and only taught two hours of Castilian. In July 2007, the Catalan Supreme
Court issued its verdict. It requested the Generalitat to abide to the 2006 Decree by adding a third hour of Castilian. The Tripartit, however, did not take notice, and instead speeded up the drafting of a new
Catalan Law of Education that established a two hours minimum (El País, July 4, 2008). One year later, the Catalan Parliament passed the new law with 89 per cent of positive votes. On top of disregarding the introduction of the “third hour,” the new Law restricted the right of Castilian speaking children to receive primary instruction in their mother language via “individualized attention” from five to only one year. The Popular Party and Ciutadans voted against it, and requested the Constitutional Court to decide on its constitutionality. But the Constitutional Court had still to decide on the new Catalan Statute. It took it five years to do so, but when it finally did in July 2010, it altered the basic agreements that the Catalan nationalists had been able to forge in the Spanish
Parliament with for the last years. It was not the Tripartit, however, which had to administer the decision of the Constitutional Court, since the last elections of 2010 gave the victory to Pujol’s party
Convergéncia I Unió.
The long waited Constitutional Court pronouncement, and its consequences
Mounting pressure from the Popular Party, who had requested the intervention of the Constitutional
Court, and the Spanish Socialist party, which needed the support of the Tripartit and Convergència i
Unió to remain in power explain the deferral of the Constitutional Court. This pressure reached its climax one month before the Constitutional Court issued its pronouncement, when twelve Catalan
44 newspapers published an editorial which openly stated that no Court could legitimately overrun a decision taken by the majority of the political representatives. Many Constitutional scholars, though, thought that some provision included in the Catalan statute could not pass the constitutionality test, and, at the same time, felt compelled to remind that the Spanish political system was based on a system of check and balances designed to avoid the tyranny of the majority.
The final pronouncement of the Constitutional Court was, eventually, a master piece of compromise.
While it rejected some articles and clauses blatantly positioned against the Spanish Constitution, it gave its approval to other contested ones, on the condition that they were interpreted in a different manner that their plain, literal reading suggested. For example, regarding art. 8.1 of the Statute, which refers to the “national symbols” of Catalonia (flag, holiday and anthem), the Court approved it, on the condition that “national” do not refer to a “nation,” but to a “nationality.” Similarly, if art. 5 of the Statute claimed that the self-governing rights of Catalonia “also” stem from the “historical rights of the Catalan people,” the Constitutional Court approved it, on the condition that it is understood that, by themselves, those historical rights lack any legal validity to support the self-government rights of Catalonia (Legal Argument –Fundamento Jurídico no. 10). Thus, and as it was the case with the former example, the Constitutional Court approved of it on the condition that it meant the opposite it literally was supposed to mean. Needless to say, the compromising attitude of the Constitutional
Court, seeking to openly reject the least number of provisions and possible, while tortuously approving others by making them mean the opposite of their original meaning did not satisfy many, nor has definitively settled some important issues, which, after four years of delays, are still open to further clarifications from the same Constitutional Court (Blanco 2010).
Linguistic issues, though, were dealt in a less tortuous manner. More interestingly, this new sentence of the Constitutional Court strongly qualified its former pronouncement of 1986, when it convened reasonable to make Catalan the “gravitational center” of primary education. More concretely, the
Constitutional Court rejected the term “preferential” of art. 6, which stated that being the own/proper language of Catalonia, “Catalan is the language of normal and preferential use of the public
45 administration and public media of Catalonia.” Instead, the Constitutional Court stated that the characterization of Catalan as the own/proper language of Catalonia “should not imply a disequilibrium … between the two languages [which might turn out to be] detrimental to Castilian.”
The preferential use of Catalan, the Constitutional Court reasoned, “entails the primacy of a language over the other … imposing, as a result, a prescription to use, in a priority manner, one of them, in this case, Catalan [preventing in this way] an unassailable equilibrium between the two languages, equally official, whereby none of them can enjoy a privilege treatment” (Legal Argument -fundamento jurídico, no. 14). This reasoning naturally had to affect art. 35.1 of the Statute, which provided that
“Catalan should be normally used as language of instruction and learning in both university and non- university education.” In this case, the Constitutional Court approved the article, but, again, in a tortuous manner, by interpreting it in the opposite way it was meant to mean. Thus, even when art
35.1 “omitted any reference to Castilian as a language of instruction” the Constitutional Court claimed that this omission could not be interpreted as having “the deliberate purpose to exclude Castilian as a language of instruction [since the only mention to Catalan] does not impede, and could not impede, an equal use of Castilian [as a language of instruction].” In any case, the driving idea that Catalan cannot be used in a preferential manner, combined with the statement that Castilian cannot be excluded as a language of instruction could easily torpedo the very basics of the Catalan immersion program, as the
Generalitat was going to realize quite promptly.
On December 2010, three sentences of the Supreme Court shocked the Catalan political elite. and much in line with the Constitutional Court pronouncement of July of that same year, three sentences of the Supreme Court shocked the Catalan political required the Generalitat to re-introduce Castilian as the language of instruction in the school system. After mentioning the “new situation” created by the last pronouncement of the Constitutional Court, and confirming the “de facto exclusion” of
Castilian, the Supreme Court urged the Generalitat to take the necessary steps to comply with the rights of parents, and “re-introduce Castilian as a language of instruction in a proportional and equitable manner vis-à-vis Catalan in all grades of compulsory education.” (El País, December 22,
46
2010).24 The Supreme Court requirement, however, was not attended. Rather, in April 2011, the
Catalan Parliament passed a motion that advocated for the “maintenance, improvement and extension of the [Catalan] immersion program in accordance with the provisions included in Law of
Education.”25 The motion of the Catalan Parliament, however, did not halt the tour de force and a couple of weeks later the Supreme Courte issued two new pronouncements urging again the
Generalitat to re-introduce Castilian in the schools (La Vanguardia, May 27, 2011).
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